The 9/11 Commission recently released their report, citing important changes which need to be made to improve our nation's homeland security. I voiced my disappointment with the House leadership when this report was left until after the August recess...
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders a...
Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.
Every time I get a bit worried about having made some second rate choices in life I go back and read about the Suffragettes or William Wilberforce, people who were 'wrong' in their own time, and think, 'Ah well.'
I was brought up by a single mom in a poor town in Arkansas and while some aspects of small-town life were really positive - like the fact that everyone there is really sweet and hospitable - there is also this close-minded mentality, and that natura...
I just made the decision that I was going to try comedy, and if didn't work, then I knew it didn't work. Then I would go back and do whatever. But at least I wouldn't torture myself the rest of my life, wondering whatever would have happened.
I teach my children that in life, there is no control of what tomorrow is going to bring. There really isn't. But in whatever it brings, we have choices, and I'm glad because I made more right choices than wrong, but in the wrong choices, there are l...
Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.
Life experiences can, at times, be quite humbling, but you learn from them. But I like the changes in my life and what kind of person they've made me into. I'm very open, not as judgmental as I was in my twenties, and a lot more compassionate.
It has been an interesting road, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, because I feel like all of those instances in my life I felt molded me and strengthened me and made me who I am.
He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like.
As it happens, I have personally been something of an enthusiast for the London Olympic games, mainly on the grounds a) that a bit of wasteland will be made nice and b) that it tends to make everybody happy that their country should be the centre of ...
As more men become more educated and women get educated, the value system has to be more enhanced and the respect for human dignity and human life is made better.
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
I've stammered all my life, and it's fair to say that my stammer has shaped my life. It's made me make some decisions that I'm sure I wouldn't have if I didn't suffer with this affliction.
I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the bigge...
It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.
Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of ...
When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it's too late to do anything about them.
I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, ...
No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've mad...
